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It's because the word has an circumflex in the original French and kept that as a borrowed word. As foreign words become more common in English they tend to lose accents etc because English doesn't have them.

And insisting on the accents once they've been lost is more a symbol of the author's pretension than anything else.
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onomatomaniakOct 21 '11 at 7:12

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And the circumflex has two, um . . . roles in French. One is to indicate a missing ‘s’. The other, as here, is to indicate the pronunciation.
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Barrie EnglandOct 21 '11 at 7:27

I sometimes forget whether we use accents in English or not; I always find myself wondering why naïve gets a red squiggly under it.
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tenfourOct 21 '11 at 12:31

Since we have unicode it's easy to use the diacriticals and where the correct pronunciation is unintuitive (as in naïve), I think it appropriate to put them in.
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z7sg ѪOct 21 '11 at 13:07

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@z7sg - it's easier now to spell foreign names correctly with accents but as foreign words become English then they lose them. Role and naive are now pretty much English words. We don't spell sky as ský because that's what it was in Norse.
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mgbOct 21 '11 at 14:55